Consider, for example, the tragic case of Americans and their guns. Count me among those who still believe that there are far too many guns in this country, that they are too easily available and too often fall into the hands of people unsuitable to own them. Those who share that position, however, long ago had to admit that we’ve lost the debate over gun control for the foreseeable future, at least.

When it comes to regulating firearms, it’s now clear that no massacre — no matter the number or nature of the victims — can change a significant number of Americans’ hearts or minds on this question. The slaughter of 20 first- and second-graders, along with six of their teachers in Connecticut made no difference and neither will the killing of six university students in Santa Barbara last weekend. The murder of Sikhs at prayer in Wisconsin had no impact, nor did the more recent shootings of three people outside Jewish institutions in Kansas. Columbine came and went, as did Virginia Tech; mass murder in an Aurora movie theater was shrugged off, as was the shooting of a congresswoman and her constituents in an Arizona shopping mall.

Over the past three decades there have been a stunning 70 mass shootings in 30 different American states, more than half of them — 36 — since 2006. Since nearly all these killers were self-evidently suffering from some form of insanity, the popular evasion in the aftermath of these bloodbaths has been the argument that it’s the mental health system that’s deficient rather than our regulation of firearms.

No sensible person is going to assert that our mental health efforts don’t require more money and support — or that we’re doing an adequate job of identifying and reaching out to troubled and isolated adolescent males. We also ought to revisit — as California’s counties now are doing with so-called “Laura’s Laws” — the notion that floridly insane individuals have a “right” to refuse treatment. Clearly, this is an area where we need to proceed tactfully, but the idea that an individual whose brain is the site of a biochemical riot has the ability to exercise free choice has turned out to be a deadly exercise in failed fellow feeling. The Isla Vista killer, for instance, had caring, involved parents and reportedly was receiving competent psychotherapy, but had refused to take the anti-psychotic medication prescribed for him.

More to the point, as wrenching as our mass shootings are, they account for a mere 1 percent of the body count attributable to our gun violence. In fact, only about 4 percent of all violent assaults of any kind in America in a given year involve someone who is mentally ill. The real nexus between guns and mental health involves suicide: Currently, more than 19,000 Americans use their firearms to commit suicide every year; a Californian who purchases a gun is four times more likely to take his own life over the next year as someone who does not. Nationally, self-inflicted gunshots have accounted for the majority of firearms deaths in every year since 1920.

Honest numbers have no ideology nor does the reality they define yield to an abstract theory of rights. On that basis, there can be little doubt that gun violence now constitutes a public health crisis: Apart from the more than 19.000 suicides by gun, America will suffer more than 11,000 homicides by firearm this year. By contrast, 15,000 U.S. residents will die of AIDS during that period. Sometime next year, according to projections by the Centers for Disease Control, the total number of gun fatalities will exceed that exacted by all traffic accidents. The ubiquity of guns in our society also fuels the real crime crisis — as opposed to the imaginary one promoted by the National Rifle Association: In the most recent year for which complete statistics are available, 385,178 crimes involving firearms were committed against Americans, including 11,512 murders (70 percent of the national total), 190,514 robberies and 183,153 aggravated assaults. On a per capita basis we suffer more gun deaths annually than any other developed country in the world — 10 for every 100,000 people.

Does having a gun in the home really make a person safer? Apart from the fact that the majority of guns used in crimes annually were stolen in residential or auto burglaries, 73,505 Americans were treated last year in hospital emergency rooms for non-fatal gunshot wounds. If we had an electrical appliance with that sort of safety record, we’d ban it.

The astonishing number of guns in this society is another inarguable reality: Though our people comprise less than 5 percent of the world’s population, they own around 50 percent of all the firearms in civilian hands. There are 88 guns for every 100 Americans — nearly twice the number of the international runner-up, Yemen. That per capita figure, according to the Congressional Research Service, translates into 310 million firearms: 114 million handguns; 110 million rifles and 86 million shotguns.

The FBI reports that Americans add to their private arsenals at the rate of 2 million guns per year. It’s been decades, moreover, since the majority of those weapons were purchased for sporting purposes. Most new weapons bought by Americans now are semi-automatic handguns or so-called tactical rifles and shotguns. Variations of the semi-automatic AR-15, originally designed as a military assault weapon, now are the most popular rifles sold in this country with an estimated 3.5 million of them already in circulation.

The fantasy that firearms make people more secure in their homes and possessions is one of the prevailing gun illusions. Another is the fanciful notion that these private arsenals are a hedge against government tyranny. The complex of beliefs that buttress that notion is a virtually perfect example of Hofstadter’s classic paranoid political style in operation. Moreover, what government could possibly impose on us a greater burden than more than 30,000 deaths and nearly 74,000 wounded every year? That’s a chilling tax extracted in blood, suffering and grief.

Finally, there’s the illusion that the Constitution’s Second Amendment confers an individual right to possess any and all firearms in every circumstance. As Michael Waldman, president of NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice, points out in his new book, “The Second Amendment: A Biography,” this notion wasn’t even promoted by the NRA until a coup by fundamentalist radicals took control of the organization in the late 1970s. The amendment’s original text, which contained a clause on conscientious objection, makes it clear that it was drafted to regulate the former colony’s militias:

“A well regulated militia composed of the body of the people, being the best security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, but no one religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person.”

Three times between 1876 and 1939, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the principle that the Second Amendment did not confer an individual right to keep firearms. As recently as 1990, Waldman reminds us, Chief Justice Warren Berger — a conservative appointed by Richard M. Nixon — called that notion “a fraud on the American public.” But, by this decade, the impact of the radicalized NRA’s contrary campaign found a hearing in the court’s current right-wing majority. Four years ago, Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the right-wing bloc in the case of District of Columbia v. Heller, found an individual right to keep guns based in the Second Amendment.

So illusion became law and the body count mounts from year to year.

Tim Rutten is a columnist for the Los Angeles News Group. ruttencolumn@gmail.com.